He was 66, and had spent the last three or four days in Colorado, Ohio and Texas, trying to pick off Congressional seats held by freshman Republicans in the majority led by Newt Gingrich.

By that point, Mr. Rangel, a Democrat from Harlem, had been coasting to re-election in his own seat for decades, though he maintained, as he did again on Friday, that he ran for office “every day of every week of every month that I am in office.”

That year, he had led his party’s fund-raising efforts, then flew around the country to add personal elbow grease. They did things differently outside of New York.

You could have had a version of that conversation with Mr. Rangel every two years or so, sometimes as he asked himself out loud about running yet again, grumbling about how fed up he was with the Republicans. But in 2006, the Democrats regained control of the House after 12 years.

Others may not have noticed, but he never lost track of his seniority. Mr. Rangel had joined the Ways and Means Committee, the principal tax-writing body of Congress, in 1974. He was the first black member of that committee.

Finally, in his fourth decade of patience, diligence and cunning, Mr. Rangel had both the seniority and the majority. He won the prize, the chairmanship.

Almost immediately, he dropped it.

Technically, Mr. Rangel is on a leave of absence as chairman of Ways and Means, but he is as likely to leave Congress as he is to return to the job he waited for so long.

He faces ethics charges whose details have yet to be made public. From what is known so far, among the most serious is that he changed his position on a tax loophole to benefit a company that was behind a $1 million pledge to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College. As of last week, City College had received $800,000 on the pledge.

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There are several other serious questions about his behavior, but none involve the kinds of personal spoils that boodler dreams are made of. Why Chairman Rangel would risk the job he had wanted so long for so little is among the more intriguing ones that have yet to be answered.

Certainly, he knew that he had long been held up by the Republicans as a symbol of the danger a Democratic majority would be to the country. During that 1996 campaign, a Republican pamphlet showed pictures of him and three other black Democrats who would become committee chairmen if their party took control.

Mr. Rangel also had to have known that his prominence as chairman would attract attention from investigative reporters and opposition researchers. Perhaps with the long habit of power, he gave himself a pass on the rules guiding the behavior of elected officials.

Now it is common to hear Mr. Rangel’s biography reduced to two words: ethically challenged. Yet it is clear that in areas of his life that did not involve filing disclosure or tax forms, Mr. Rangel followed an unmistakable ethical compass. He was arrested protesting apartheid in South Africa, and later pushed for foreign tax credits to be stripped from companies doing business there.

In 1999, he was among many arrested in Lower Manhattan during protests over the police shooting of an unarmed man. When the mayor at the time, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dismissed the demonstrations as a “publicity stunt,” Mr. Rangel replied: “If a horse were shot down in front of the Hotel Plaza, there would be crowds protesting, and no one would wonder why.”

On that Election Day in 1996, he spoke about his truant childhood in Harlem, and how the Army had straightened him out. When the United States was considering the invasion of Iraq in 2002, he pointed out that his old Army unit was still in Korea, 50 years after it arrived, and then put forward symbolic bills reinstating the draft — a way, he said, for the country to face up to the costs of war.

It was a subject he knew well.

Asked that Election Day what he had earned his medals for in Korea, he said, “Track.”

In fact, he was awarded the Bronze Star for leading 40 men from behind enemy lines in subzero temperatures while wounded. His biggest job was staying awake. “Some guys just had to sleep,” Mr. Rangel said in 1996. “They froze to death.”

For 60 years, he has managed to never lie down in the snow.

Correction: August 1, 2010

The About New York column in some editions last Sunday, about the plight of Representative Charles B. Rangel as he deals with ethics charges, gave an outdated amount for a donation by a company and one of its executives to the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College. As of July 23, the company, Nabors Industries, and its chief executive officer had donated $800,000 — not $500,000 — of a $1 million pledge to the center.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on July 25, 2010, on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: After Waiting So Long, Rangel Dropped the Prize. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe